And I smiled too, and felt the soul-anchoring joy of being understood.

You realised that we weren't special. We weren't superheroes. We were just old. And that, in cases such as Hendrich, it didn't really matter how many years or decades or centuries had passed, because you were always living within the parameters of your personality. No expanse of time or place could change that. You could never escape yourself.

And when I felt nothing I almost became nostalgic for the grief; at least when you felt pain you knew you were still alive.

'Well, I love music. I love playing music. But I'd find it a hard thing to teach. I've always found it hard to talk about music.’

It made me lonely. And when I say lonely, I mean the kind of loneliness that howls through you like a desert wind. It wasn't just the loss of people I had known but also the loss of myself. The loss of who I had been when I had been with them.

‘The past is never gone. It just hides.’

And she died and I lived and a hole opened up, dark and bottomless, and I fell down and kept falling for centuries.

The longer you live, the more you realise that nothing is fixed. Everyone will become a refugee if they live long enough. Everyone would realise their nationality means little in the long run. Everyone would see their worldviews challenged and disproved. Everyone would realise that the thing that defines a human being is being a human .

I don't know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken.

They probably weren't. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.